


Wolfchild

by garrideb



Category: Doctor Who (2005), Torchwood
Genre: Body Modification, Community: wintercompanion, Future Fic, Future Torchwood, Gen, Immortality, Jack Harkness: Future Version, Temporary Character Death - Jack Harkness, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-07
Updated: 2011-08-07
Packaged: 2017-10-22 07:43:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/235755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/garrideb/pseuds/garrideb
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack struggles with what to call himself as he leaves humanity further and further behind.  Written: 4/2008</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wolfchild

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the prompt 'power' at [Winter Companions](http://wintercompanion.livejournal.com/).

For a long time after the Game Station, he struggles with what to call it. He refuses to call it immortality, because that implies forever, and he can’t bear to think of himself as forever. He isn’t immortal. He just can’t stay dead. Yet.

He tries to think of words with fewer connotations of permanence. He thinks of _consistent_ , of _ongoing_ , of _abiding_. But they sound too soft, too nice to describe his morbid cycles of life and death.

 _Deathlessness. Morbidly challenged. Life excessive._

None of them fit, though. When pressed to explain his condition, he doesn’t give it a name. He tells them he can’t die, that something is keeping him here. No one else gives him a name for it, for which he is grateful. It’s too personal a job to give away.

When he becomes leader of Torchwood Three, he thinks about it less. He has his team to worry about. They aren’t... well, they aren’t like him. They can die.

* * *

He likes watching Suzie work with the gauntlet. The way she peers at it so closely, the light dancing on her glasses. The way she touches it, as if she knows that its powers aren’t meant for humanity. Knows, but dismisses with the burning fire of searching, of questing, of pilgrimage into the unknown.

She calls it the resurrection gauntlet, but Jack wonders if she calls it something else in her mind. If she calls herself something else when she wields it.

* * *

He finds the Doctor, but the Time Lord has none the answers Jack hoped for. He doesn’t even have a name for it. Well, he has a name ( _wrong_ ), but it isn’t one Jack will accept.

He’s relieved to find it was Rose, and not the Doctor who was responsible for his condition. Rose loved the Doctor, so everything she did with the power of the vortex she would have done for the Doctor’s benefit. Even if the Time Lord can’t see it, Jack exists for him.

But _how_ he doesn’t see it. For a brief moment at the end of the universe the Doctor looked at Jack, looked at him with searchlight purpose through a small glass window, but then the Master came and monopolized that gaze.

After it’s all over, Jack declines the Doctor’s invitation.

* * *

He has a long time to think while burred alive, waiting for Cardiff to mature above him. He isn’t being dragged back and forth through life and death, thank goodness, he’s just lying there with his mind sluggish but active and his body stiff and cold.

Even if his heart could beat at this point, he doubts it would make a difference.

But it will beat again.

The ground soaks and dries with the seasons, and generations of insects make their tedious way around him as they build their nests and lay their eggs. The rain that manages to seep down to him might smell of farms, cities, or factories, if he could inhale their scent.

He finally decides to name it _regeneration_. He is continually regenerative. It is neither a gift nor a curse, but something embedded so deeply in him that he might as well have been born with it, and it is only as good or terrible as his intentions.

He intends to survive.

* * *

He runs into the Doctor, sometimes, but Jack senses it is too early to go back to him. Sometimes, dozens of years go by between the adrenaline rich storms of their meet-ups. The Doctor asks at first, but Jack keeps saying no and soon he stops asking. The invitation hasn’t disappeared, though, just the words.

Torchwood fluctuates around him. He hires Soma in the year 2321. She has Toshiko’s brilliance, as well as her shy smile. With those, plus humanity’s overall technological development, she is able to build him a small device that can perform over 900 functions using sonic waves.

Jack never leaves the hub without it.

The coral on his desk grows, changes. Centuries pass, and it no longer fits on his desk. He makes it a new room next to his bunker. At first there is only an open doorway connecting the rooms, but some nights it glows, and is bright enough to wake him. He installs a thick curtain, reluctant to put a solid door between them.

There’s a new weight pressing on his mind when he’s down there. He relishes it.

* * *

In 2585, Jack finds himself recovering in the clinic bed of a Dr. Cornwell. With Owen’s tenacity and flexible morals, Dr. Cornwell agreed to perform a one-of-a-kind procedure on Jack.

Jack smiles as he stretches in bed. The linens are expensive - not typical of patient beds. Then again, he spent nearly eight decades of savings on this procedure, so the silk sheets are a nice touch.

There’s an itching on the right side of his chest. He scratches, wondering if the slightly annoying sensation is all that’s left of his surgery. Of course there’s no scar - not even the faint discoloration most people can expect these days.

He closes his eyes. He can feel the new organ, grown just for him, snug in its spot beneath his right ribs. The strange rhythm it’s pulsing will take longer to get used to, but a little unease is worth the extra oxygen and chemicals it sends to his brain.

There’s a knock on the door and Dr. Cornwell enters, a self-pleased smile on his face. Ignoring all the standard procedure, he gets straight to the point. “Is it working?”

Jack quirks an eyebrow. “Can I give it a spin and find out?” At Cornwell’s nod, Jack concentrates. The images he gets are startlingly strong. Unrefined, they come at him in a rush. People. Places. Cornwell’s life. “Whoa,” he says, and Cornwell’s smile deepens.

It takes time and training, but he soon controls his organ-enhanced telepathy. Now, when he stands near her, he feels more than just a weight against his mind. There are sounds like wisps of alien song, and glass-shard emotions. She wants to go. She wants to see. She wants to do.

He takes apart the entire hub to build her the circuits she needs.

* * *

Their first flight is wild. Jack can’t restrain a whoop of joy as they leave the base behind, but it soon turns into an exhilarated scream. They are hurtling through the vortex, carried along as if amid a spectral stampede. She is screaming, too, a wordless realization of everything existence means to a TARDIS.

It’s not all smooth sailing, though. When they travel, Jack finds that she siphons off the life energy in his body in addition to the rift energy she uses. He wouldn’t mind, but it’s a sickly feeling that runs through his veins and leaves him feeling drained. It takes nearly a month - and frequent refueling stops at Cardiff - to wean her off this habit.

Everything about her is untamed. Traveling in her is nothing like traveling in the TARDIS, save for the design of the console room. That, Jack suspects, she modeled after the images in his own mind. The light is different, though, and the sounds. Jack never mistakes where he is.

She is still growing. He finds new rooms and spaces as he explores her, and she burrows into previously hidden corners of his mind. She isn’t subtle. There is no elegance to their connection, but Jack could care less. He adores her.

Some days he worries about growing a TARDIS without the foggiest idea of what he was doing. He is reminded of the legends of human children raised by wolves. When he has this thought, during a timeless moment in the vortex, sitting in a brand new room, she sends him a warm pulse of a solar smile. He pats her wall. “Wolf child,” he says. “Wolfie.” She smiles again.

* * *

They soar around suns. He plays in the first olympics. He loses, shrugs, and tries again four, sixteen, forty years later. She takes them to the center of her favorite constellation, where, with a tickling of mischief to the back of his mind, she drains energy from him and sends it out in an impossibly bright pulse. Millions of years and an instant later, he steps out onto a deserted beach. They stand together and bathe in the light of their momentary star, burning roughly in the center of Orion’s forehead.

They pick up other beings, now and again, but they never stay long, and Jack doesn’t mind.

* * *

He doesn’t keep track of time anymore, so he doesn’t know how long has passed when he opens the door and sees a blue police box across the plaza in 21st century Cardiff. Wolfie tugs sharply at his memories, and a moment later her body morphs as Jack watches. The white stone fountain she was becomes wooden and blue. He laughs.

The TARDIS door opens, and the Doctor steps out. Suddenly, Jack can’t breathe. He leans against Wolfie’s paneling, waiting for the the Doctor to look up. What will he see?, Jack wonders. He's been living and dying for hundreds of years. He isn’t Jack anymore. For the first time in his life, he is on even ground with the Doctor. It’s what he’s been waiting for. He is ready.

Look up, he thinks. Look up.


End file.
